(HDMI) standardizes the transfer of color depth information during the initialization of the transfer (at pre-setup). Color depth is used to describe the number of bits used in a single pixel to make up a color. The more bits per pixel, the better the transition from one color to another and the more detailed the different shades of a specific color that are adjacent to one another. Since passing the color depth information to the downstream device is optional, it is not implemented in all devices.
The High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) supports video data in four different color depths defined in the frames, namely 24, 30, 36 and 48 bits. The beginning of a frame is marked with a vertical synchronization (VSYNC) signal. The video frame data is represented by pixels and categorized into three different sets, namely control data, data islands and video data. The size of each pixel corresponds to the color depth. But when the frame is transported, it is transmitted through a 24-bit bus referred to as the Transition-Minimized Differential Signaling (TMDS).
When the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) standard encryption mechanism applied over HDMI, for data islands and video data. The window of opportunity (WOO) is used to mark whether a frame is encrypted or unencrypted. If the frame is encrypted, the control bus in the TMDS is marked with 4′h9 during the WOO. The value 4′h9 can only be seen in the control bus (4-bit wide) during the WOO when transmitting an encrypted frame. If the value 4′h9 is seen in the control bus outside of the WOO or in an unencrypted frame, then it is an erroneous frame. The WOO is typically defined as the interval between the 512th and 527th pixel clocks after the VSYNC of every frame.
With higher color depth (30, 36 or 48-bit), the pixel size is different from the TMDS bus width, therefore the WOO should be adjusted accordingly as per Table 1, which indicates the TMDS clock cycles from the rising edge of the VSYNC:
TABLE 1Color depthWOO startWOO end2451252730640659367687914810241055
In some implementation, the start of the WOO is fixed to the 512th bit clock cycles, regardless of the color depths which means that it would be impossible to properly decrypt a frame if the color depth is not set to 24-bits, because the 4′h9 signal will not be found in the proper location. In order to support these implementations along with the standard-compliant ones, an adaptive mechanism is needed to identify whether a frame is encrypted regardless of the color depth.